1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus which uses a pointing device and is capable of an input operation, and to a method of operating the pointing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Portable personal computers of a notebook type or laptop type have recently been provided with a pointing device which enables, for example, a mouse pointing operation and a numeric key input operation (e.g., refer to Japanese Patent KOKAI Publication No. 2000-339097).
In this prior art, an LCD is disposed behind a touch pad made of a transparent material. The touch pad is used as the pointing device to designate a position on an LCD screen, thereby inputting a trajectory of a point. The pointing device is used to input a trajectory of an index (pointer) which is displayed on the display screen of the LCD and moved in response to an input operation.
In the pointing device of this kind, moving a mouse pointer to a desired position in an actual display area or on a virtual screen has been accomplished by a sliding operation of the pointing device on the touch pad, a moving operation of a mouse, a rolling operation of a track ball, a cursor key operation on a keyboard and the like.
A size of the touch pad is naturally smaller than a screen size of a main display device, so that the above-mentioned operations need to be repeated for a plurality of times to move the mouse pointer for a long distance in a state where a fine pitch is set for a movement amount of the pointer of the pointing device, which is a problem in operability. To avoid this, if a greater pitch is set for the movement amount of the pointer of the pointing device, a movement speed of the mouse pointer can be higher and thus the number of repeating operations can be reduced. This, however, makes it difficult to finely adjust the position of the mouse pointer, and again forces poor operability.
Furthermore, in a state where the virtual screen (desktop) larger than the actual display area is set, and only part of the desktop is displayed on the main display device and a movement end of the mouse pointer is not displayed on the main display device, a panning operation is required to move the display area within the virtual screen, which poses a problem that the operability becomes worse.